Meet you at the Towers of Gold stage at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

For the past nine years, Warren Hellman has been giving the Bay Area a wonderful present: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

With fantastic musicians like Emmy Lou Harris, Gillian Welch, Steve Earle, Hazel Dickens, and countless more, Warren has put on concerts enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people. And since he pays for the event out of his own pocket, there are no corporate logos plastered on the stages or high priced tickets to contend with.

The result is an amazing three days where, I swear, everyone is smiling and happy. I’ve been at Hardly Strictly when the fog is so dense you cannot see the tops of the trees and when the sun is so bright you need a hat and sunglasses. Regardless, the mood is festival and upbeat.

This year Warren Hellman is giving me a gift, and I want to publicly thank him: He is naming a new, sixth, stage after the title of a book I wrote about our common ancestor. It’s called the Towers of Gold Stage and you can bet I will be hanging out there a lot this weekend.

Buddy Miller leads off the opening set on the Towers of Gold stage on Saturday, and Marianne Faithful, Allen Touissant, and many others will be playing. They are just three of 65 amazing artists who will be performing in Golden Gate Park this weekend.

There is another set I will not miss, because this one is also all in the family. My sister-in-law Pamela Rose will be unveiling her new act called Wild Women of Song. It features songs written by female composers from the Jazz Era and it will be a rollicking time. Pamela performs at 1:40 p.m. on the Porch Stage. (Where Warren Hellman’s own group, The Wronglers, opens the festival at 11 am)

Now, why is the stage called Towers of Gold?

Because Isaias Hellman, the mutual ancestor I share with Warren, was a prominent banker in California in the late 19th and early 20th century. (He served as president of Wells Fargo and many other banks.) It was a time when banks were almost completely unregulated and there were frequent bank runs and bank panics.

In 1893, Hellman famously rescued the city of Los Angeles from a disastrous panic when he piled gold coin into towers of gold on a bank counter. His gesture calmed everyone down and the panic ended. You can read about it here.

I named my book Towers of Gold. (That’s the cover to the book below) Warren has been very supportive of this project from the start. But little did I realize he was so jazzed that he went ahead and named a stage after my book.

You can find me there. I will be the one with the biggest grin in the park.